Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad issued a call today
to foreign terrorists to stop using the plight of the Palestinians as
an excuse for their crimes. In condemning the Toulouse massacre two
days after the killings, Fayyad said, “Extremists must stop
pretending to stand up for the rights of Palestinian children who
only ask for a decent life.” This was in reaction to the news that
Mohammed Merah, the arrested suspect in the Toulouse shootings,
claimed that the atrocity was done in part to exact revenge on the
Jews for their supposedly poor treatment of the Palestinians.

Fayyad is right that “solidarity” with the Palestinians ought not to
be used as a reason to commit murder. But as much as that is good
advice for those, like Merah, who have links to al Qaeda and other
Islamist groups, it would be even better if Fayyad’s own people —
including those affiliated with the PA government that he still runs —
would heed his plea. Palestinian groups like Hamas (soon to become
part of the PA), PA President Mahmoud Abbas’s own Fatah Party, as
well as more extreme groups such as Islamic Jihad, have been using
their complaints against Israel as justification for crimes just as
horrible as those committed in Toulouse for decades.

Fayyad condemned the Toulouse shootings as an “attack on innocent
lives” and a “cowardly terrorist act.” But how would he describe the
missile attacks on Israeli civilians carried out by Palestinians on a
regular basis to this very day from Gaza. How would he describe the
routine attacks on Jews in the West Bank? And what words can he
conjure him to adequately depict the depravity of the campaign of
suicide bombings carried out by leaders of the ruling Fatah Party
only a few years ago during the second intifada? Were the Jewish
infants slaughtered at a Jerusalem pizza restaurant, or the Jewish
teens blown up at a Tel Aviv discotheque or those killed in dozens of
other incidents less human, less innocent than the children killed in
France this week?

The Palestinians more or less invented the modern variant of
terrorism in the 1970s and have always justified their policy of
trying to murder as many Jewish civilians as possible because of what
they say is their plight under Israeli occupation. Though the current
leadership of the Palestinian Authority says it opposes terror, it
continues to honor terrorists in every way possible including its
television broadcasts.

Fayyad is himself one of the rare Palestinian political figures who
have never been implicated in terrorism. That’s to his credit but
it’s also the reason why he has virtually no constituency among his
own people. Were he linked to some murders of Jews, he might not be
on the way out of office since Hamas has demanded Fayyad’s ouster as
part of the price for joining the PA.

The Palestinians should be worried about the Toulouse attack because
it should serve as a reminder to Europeans that their
delegitimization of Jewish life and Jewish self-defense in Israel
cannot be separated from attacks on Jews elsewhere. Though the
Palestinian issue is merely a pretext for the revival of anti-
Semitism, the killings in France could shock some on the continent
enough to make them understand that killing Jews anywhere — be it in
Toulouse or in the Middle East — is merely a function of that same
old hatred that the Palestinians have embraced.

As much as some, such as EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton,
have tried to draw a slanderous comparison between Israeli self-
defense in Gaza and the Toulouse crime, the real analogy is to the
actions of the Palestinians. Until the Palestinians renounce their
war on Israel and give up violence for good, Salam Fayyad’s statement
can be put down as the rankest form of hypocrisy.